How (Not) To Write A Serial Story

Or how not to make it more difficult than it should be

I really should listen to my own advice. In How to Write (and Read) A Serial Story I offered two tips.

• Your complete story should be written before you publish the first episode.

• Writing a serial story is not as simple as taking a book-length story and chopping it into bits.

I followed this advice when creating my first serials, The Donnington Chronicles (which is also a full length book) and The Mistress’ Pet Show which was first published as a feature length story in an anthology. Both of these were chopped up but with some judicious editing to ensure that there was a ‘what next’ moment at the end of each chapter and that each chapter was an engaging part of the story.

Painted Stripes was written as a serial and I followed my own advice. The complete story was in place before publication of the first episode, although the final episodes were a little hazy. Thanks to comments by

John A. Brown

and some other readers I did a rewrite of the final episode which resulted in, in my opinion, one of my best stories to date.

At the Edge of Dreams is proving a more difficult project. The complete story was theoretically there as it was initially written as a book. The problem was that the original publisher had suggested several rewrites to make it a more comfortable fit with his house style. This meant the story had a lot more romance in it than is usual for my stories and lost some of its darker themes. Simple, I thought, rewrite closer to the original and publish as a serial.

Now we get to the advice on publishing stories as a series.

The first part of a story is often exposition. We need to tell the reader a little about our characters, set the scene and establish the time period. In a short story, this needs to be done succinctly as the reader is primarily there for the entertainment: they want to get to the action. The writer can then feed in little drips of relevant information as the story unfolds.

When writing a book the exposition can be a little more leisurely. The reader can simply keep turning the pages until something happens (One of my friends did comment recently that she nearly abandoned a book as the author spent six chapters describing the dreamy countryside before anything happened).

In a serial something needs to happen in each episode as the reader has to wait, and maintain the desire to read the next episode, until it arrives. My first task when rewriting At the Edge of Dreams was to dump nearly two chapters of exposition and condense the relevant parts down to a couple of paragraphs. Some of the reveal was saved to be added to later episodes to keep the suspense going.

I am fortunate to have several incisive and talented commenters on my work including

John A. Brown

and

Posy Churchgate

. I also have several offline readers who do not pull their punches. One of these completed a character sketch of Kate Mason from The Edge of Dreams. When she got to, ‘What are her motivations, what does she want to achieve?’ she wrote ????

I have written so much about characters’ motivations including Make It Believable and What Do You Want From A Sexy Story, yet in, At the Edge of Dreams, I have managed to create a character that has not got a core motivation or desire. This is being fixed.

John A. Brown

also asked, ‘Why does she keep charging off to the wood looking for fairies?’ There is a reason for this which will be revealed in a couple of episodes but it also needs to tie in with Kate’s core motivation (even if she is not aware of, or admitted to, what is driving her).

The Takeaway

• Easiest - Write your story as a series and structure it as that from the start. Complete it before publishing the first episode.

• Relatively Easy - Take an existing long story or book that you are happy with and republish it as a series. As long as you divide it up and do a little editing prior to publication this is a good way to reuse your work.

• Untangling A Ball of String - Rewriting a story that you are not happy with as you publish each episode.

I know some writers are happy to write the next episode of a serial as they publish the previous one. If this works for you, do it, but I find it a high-stress strategy as I often like to sit back and let my stories mature for a month or so before I publish.

If you are reading At the Edge of Dreams, do not worry - I will get there. The central theme of the story is established, it is merely the telling that is being edited. The downside is that the rewriting is taking more time than I anticipated which is slowing down my production of free subscriber stories and articles like this.

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